COBOL (programming language) was a huge advance over assembly, at the time. They thought looking like English was very good. But the understanding has evolved since.

COBOL is verbose (even the simplest hello world program will need a lot of declarations), its syntax is huge so a reference card is usually employed; declarations cannot be well nested so you end up writing paragraphs which are actually beautified GOTOs; syntax has a very large set of reserved keywords, which means that for every new feature in the language you'd have to enlarge the syntax with new keywords (as opposed to today's succint set of keywords, with functionality extended by libraries); syntax is awkward and non-flexible (full arithmethic expressions are only accepted in the specific command for that). It is non-recursive. Format was rigid and column-bound. and so on. Very ugly.